I have followed the BackTrack 4 Persistent USB install instructions linked in the HOWTO section. I am booting from a 2Gb non-persistent BackTrack 4 USB I created using UNetbootin and am attempting to create the persistent install on my 8Gb USB.

When I get to "rsync -r /media/cdrom0/* .", it appears to copy for a while and then fails with the following:

It appears from the 2nd line that there supposedly isn't enough space in the 1st partition for filesystem.squashfs. However, I followed the instructions and set up 1.5Gb partition which the instructions seemed to indicate was enough.

I've searched google and the forums... Do I just need to expand my partition, or is there something more insidious going on?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Ok. Hopefully some other newb will read this and it will help. I went and looked at the size of the filesystem.squashfs on the non-persistent drive and it, alone, was over 1.5Gb, more than the install instructions in the HOWTO suggested for the boot partition! So, I bumped the size of the boot partition to 1.8Gb and that worked. I now have persistent BackTrack 4 on an 8Gb USB drive. Cool beans.

Sadly, neither one of my USB drives seem to boot on my brand new Toshiba w/ i3. Haven't quite figured out the problem there yet. Grrr...

Can someone update those HOWTO instructions? If not, then at least if someone goes looking for this information like I did, perhaps they'll find the answer in this thread.

How 'bout that! A relative newb who answered his own question! Proud of me? LOL.

05-18-2010, 01:01 PM

skull-port

Re: Persistent install to 8Gb USB - rsync error

This might help. If I had a new 8GB USB for persistent changes I would do something like:
2GB format as FAT32 | 6GB format at EXT3 with label "casper-rw"
Use Unetbootin to install BT4-Final to the 2GB partition.
Then follow the instructions in the guide etc etc having booted under the Persistent CD option.